The famous American university will offer courses in 2025 to study “the influence of Beyoncé on black feminist thought and American culture”.
After the University of Copenhagen and the ENS, Yale University in the United States will offer courses on Beyoncé, according to information from Yale News spotted by Konbini.
Professor of African-American studies and Music Daphne Brooks will teach this course in spring 2025. The module is titled: “Beyoncé Makes History: History, Culture, Theory and Politics of the Black Radical Tradition in through music.
The course will take Beyoncé’s work from 2013 to 2024 as a prism to study “black history, intellectual thought and the stage”, specifies Yale News.
“So much energy around Beyoncé”
This course is a section of a larger course taught by Daphne Brooks at Princeton, on “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.”
“These classes were always very busy,” explains the teacher. “And there was so much energy around Beyoncé, even though it was a course that started in the late 19th century and continued to the present day. I always thought I should come back to her and focus her work on the educational level.
For Daphne Brooks, this seems like the right time to teach Beyoncé, given “the way she has integrated history and politics”, as well as her “really concrete engagements in black cultural life, in her aesthetic of stage and in using her voice as a portal to think about history and politics – there is simply no one like her
Beyoncé isn’t the only pop star to benefit from this treatment. Several universities, including Harvard and those of New York and Ghent in Belgium, are looking at the work of Taylor Swift and her influence on pop culture.
